Weight Stigma in Children (with Molly Forbes)

In this episode of ‘The Fat Doctor Podcast’, Dr. Natasha Larmie is joined by writer, campaigner and public speaker, Molly Forbes.  Molly is the Director of Body Happy Org and author of the book "Body Happy Kids: how to help children and teens love the skin they’re in". 

Together Natasha and Molly share a passionate and spirited discussion about:

• The impact of diet culture and anti-fat bias in children
• Ways in which we can start tackling weight stigma in schools and other organisations that work with children
• Weight Management Services and the dangers of weighing children in school
• The West Sussex case in which 2 children were removed from their loving home after failing at weight loss

Thank you for listening

If you enjoy this podcast and would like to support Natasha so that she can continue making them, you can join her on Patreon.  If you fancy connecting with other like-minded people in a safe and non judgmental environment, then why not join her Facebook group the ‘Friends of The Fat Doctor’? You can also check out her webiste or find her on all the usual social media channels including Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok. 

Resources and links mentioned in this episode:

The Body Happy Org website.

The book Body Happy Kids: how to help children and teens love the skin they’re in.

A more details analysis of the West Sussex case is available on my website.

More about the show:

How would you react if someone told you that most of what we are taught to believe about healthy bodies is a lie? 

How would you feel if that person was a medical doctor with over 20 years experience treating patients and seeing the harm caused by all this misinformation?

In her podcast, Dr Natasha Larmie,  an experienced General Practitioner and self-styled Fat Doctor, examines and challenges 'health' as we know it through passionate, unfiltered conversations with guest experts, colleagues and friends.

She tackles the various ways in which weight stigma and anti-fat bias impact both individuals and society as a whole.  From the classroom to the b

Got a question for the next podcast? Let me know!

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Transcript

Natasha  0:26 
Welcome to another episode of the Fat Doctor podcast. Today we're going to be speaking to a friend of mine, Molly Forbes, who is an author, campaigner and public speaker. She is the director of a social enterprise called body happy org, who are dedicated to the creation of resources products, education and training programs to help boost body image health and well being in children. They are a multidisciplinary team of experts. And Ollie is going to be talking a little bit more about them. Later on in the podcast. Molly trained as a journalist, and is the author of an amazing book called body happy kids how to help children and teens love the skin they're in. She is an absolute gem of a human being. She has taught me so much about weight stigma, especially as it pertains to children. And I am very much looking forward to diving into a conversation with her. Be warned, when we get together, we can't stop talking. This one may go on for a little while folks, prepare yourself. Amazing. I'm so glad to see you, Molly. As I said to you Just now I have not made any plans about this podcast, we're just gonna just start talking. They're the best. They're the best conversations, I think, absolutely. You are an expert, I think in your own way in children's health, specifically where it relates to weight, and body image and body acceptance or however you want to label it. And I'm excited to have this conversation with you. Because I think there's a huge difference between health and weights, as you know, but the messages have been mixed up. So as an introduction, can you kind of explain new to people who maybe haven't followed you or do follow you but don't necessarily know the background, how you got into all of this and where it all started.

Molly  2:31  
So I'm a journalist by trade, I've got a master's in broadcast journalism. And I worked as a journalist for 15 years in the media as a reporter, a producer, and a researcher, and then later on a presenter on a breakfast radio show. And I ended up kind of branching out from just doing broadcast journalism to becoming a print journalist as well. I went freelance after I became a mum. And that was then how I ended up existing partially on the internet as well. So started writing, mainly, like I had like a mommy blog, and I used to make videos about like family days out. That never went, I always like aspired to be some kind of like, have some kind of perfect fluffy Instagram kind of, but they never went according to plan that was kind of the joy of it, really. So I kind of built up a little bit of a platform. And I was doing that along with writing for kind of parenting outlets, and magazines, and just kind of writing or going on the radio doing, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Definitely a media that was what my background was nothing to do with body image, nothing to do with campaigning very kind of, you know, whoever just would pay me the money, I'd write the thing. And I had my own kind of, as we all do, like thoughts and feelings about my body. And it wasn't until I became a mum that I started to be a bit more aware that I didn't want to pass some of my stuff on to my kids. Although I think I got off fairly lightly compared to a lot of, you know, my friends and acquaintances and people I know growing up, I'd always had a pretty positive relationship with food.

Although, you know, I think really wasn't until I was about 12 that I started to be self conscious of my body, which is very normal because there's when there's a girl your body changes and go through puberty, going to secondary school boys making comments, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Started to equate my worth with the way I looked. started to feel like maybe perhaps my body like didn't really belong to me in a way you know, but this was awkward. have normal stuff. And it wasn't, it never kind of developed into a full blown issue, it was always sort of just gently bumping along in the background, I'd sort of be on and off the diet bandwagon when I was in my early 20s. And I think doing the job that I did didn't help. So I was working. You know, in a radio station, talking about celebrities writing about celebrities very much in this showbiz world, you know, where people's worth is equated with how they look. And for my job, I would have to like read the Daily Mail sidebar of shame every day, which is not good for your mental health or your body image. So when I was working as a radio presenter, I had a, my daughter was one, and we were getting married later that year. So I just become a mom. So my body had gone through, you know, massive changes, my whole identity had shifted. I was getting married later in the year, which is a prime time when women are often like, aggressively marketers are told that they need to change their body in order to look amazing on their wedding day. And I was working in this fairly toxic industry that, you know, was all about the way people looked. And all of that kind of came together for me to decide that I was going to go I never called it a diet, I always called it a quote unquote, health kick. Because for me at the time, it was, you know, very much the way that you it was all about it was all about health. You know, it wasn't about health, it was all about getting a certain shape body. But, you know, I told myself, it was all about health. So I did like a boot camp. And, you know, I used to do really problematic things like I should say, trigger warning here in case anyone has any issues with food, but I was on and off, you know, this intermittent fasting thing. When I look back now, like it makes me really upset to think what I was doing to my body, because I was getting up at half past three in the morning to drive to work to go and present a breakfast radio show. And then working all day, picking up my my baby at you know, in the afternoon being with her all afternoon, being a mum and then doing a whole load of writing work in the evening, not going to bed until 11 o'clock at night, and then doing it all over again. And three out of those days, I would only allow myself to eat 500 calories. You know, it's so dangerous. And I would do things like I would make porridge in the morning. And I would have like my porridge as I was like when we were playing a song or whatever. And I wouldn't allow myself to have milk, even skimmed milk, I would make it with water. Like just it was disgusting. But also, that is so disordered eating. But it was it was praised. And it was normalized in the culture that the culture that we all live in. Everyone else in the office at the time was doing this, I don't want to say the name of the diet. But we all know the one we've probably all tried it at some point, there was a big book about it, there were loads of you know, articles about it in newspapers and magazines. And it would be like, Oh, it's the fasting day or whatever they called it, you know, we'd all be on at the same time. And we'd all like bond together about how miserable we were and joke about it like it was funny. And then I would get in my car and drive home and nearly pass out. just awful. And after we got married, I sort of like realized, I think that that wasn't a very good thing to be doing. And just sort of like, as with, you know, you go on and on it and off it and on it and off it and then there's a new one that comes along. And my real turning point was when my I we'd moved to a new place, I'd had a second daughter, and she was a baby. And similar thing. Actually, this is I think, actually, as I'm saying, This is the first time I've ever realized this properly. I think a lot of my body issues in the past have coincided with like big life events or changes. So looking back, it was you know, the whole like becoming a mom or having a baby getting married, doing a new job. And then we moved to a new area became a mom again, wasn't getting very much sleep doing a new job again, because I've left that radio job. And I think I wanted to exert some kind of control feel, you know, tell myself like, if I could get my post baby body back, I'd get my post baby life back in some way. And I had a real kind of epiphany moment. My eldest daughter was I think she was five or six at the time, and she was asking me why I was weighing spinach. And I was doing some macro or something that involved weighing spinach, which is just like, what was I doing? And I think for me, that was the point and honestly, I don't want to why am i i can't i can't think to how I'm going to describe this to you and explain this to you in a rational way. Because the reality was that I was waiting for Because I wanted to lose weight and get a flat stomach before we went on holiday so I could wear a bikini? And what am I going to tell my daughter that you can only wear a bikini on the beach, if you've got a flat stomach was like, Molly, what are you doing? Seriously, you need to sort this out.

And that was when I started reading and, and educating myself and becoming more aware of what even diet culture was, you know, anti fat bias and these big conversations about health, realizing that I had been completely misguided on educated media made a huge load of a huge amount of assumptions carried a huge amount of internalized bias I didn't even realize I had. And so I thought, well, I've got these skills. I'm quite good at communicating, although you wouldn't know it from this rambling monologue.

Natasha  10:53  
That's not rambley It's a sad story. It's a sad story, but it's a very common camino. Yeah, I've heard the story millions of times in different forms. I only slept when I ask people now I kind of I brace myself, because we're all in the same situation, we grew up in a society that told us that then this was a currency, you know, it would buy us stuff, I get very frustrated when people say, Oh, it doesn't matter what you look like, it does matter massively. So what you look like is gonna affect your employment. And I think you probably have that realization Didn't you that if you wanted to continue in that life, where you were a journalism and it was all about the celebrity and the body, you know, your body was going to have to pull its weight, for want of a better word, you are going to have to remain thin, I feel the same way at work you name it's very difficult being in the body that I'm in, in the job that I'm in. And I think when we are not alone, in this experience, it's for most people, and if it's not work, it's your family, if it's not your family, its school, its education, its you know, it's the criminal justice system, wherever you go, it's health care, you are judged, met predominantly on your body, whether it's you know, the size of your stomach, but also the color of your skin and you know, your gender identity, whatever it is, you are being judged every single second of every day because of your body. And so this desire to make your body fit in, I think is completely normal and justified. But as you said, you had this this moment where you suddenly thought, I cannot justify this to my own child. And if I can't justify it to my own child, then I'm in trouble. yet. We grew up in this society and our children are also growing up in a society and I don't you know, I think it's harder this generation. And you know, the generations that have come after us, I think, have had it worse and worse and worse. I want to talk about Body Body happy org. I mean, yeah, that's really important. So tell me about it. Tell me about, like, how you got into that.

Molly  12:48  
So I guess once I started my own, can I swear on this? Once I started my own shit out, and I started to realize, like, kind of work on my own mindset and felt better. I went through this phase of feeling really angry all the time, because I noticed all the messages that were trying to pull me back. And then I got really, really angry because I noticed how a lot of these messages were coming from my kids too. You know, so when my eldest was a toddler, and I was doing those awful things like the porridge with the water, I would watch Peppa Pig and I wouldn't think anything of it, I would think, Oh, Daddy pigs fat belly. Hahaha, you know, it's like, oh, it's jolly. And then when my second daughter was born, I remember watching him This is awful. Why is that he pigs body always to the punchline of the joke, you know? Why do all the prince Disney Princesses with the same? Why have I not noticed this before? And then why it why they wanted to wear my child in school? Why is that kid in the playground calling that other kid fat? Like it's an insult? And I started to notice it everywhere. Why have they got Slimming World adverts on on this local school? Grayling's? Why is this happening? And I went through a phase of being really annoyed. So rather than kind of just ranting, I decided to channel that and I started a campaign which was just to try and raise awareness about the impact of of diet chat around children, and the fact that the diet industry is completely unregulated in the way that they advertise around children. There are strict rules around the way they can advertise on television and on the radio. But there's no rules to stop them from putting their marketing material up on school gates or in dance classes or whatever. Like they want to go to the places where the parents hang out. Parents hang out in places where kids are hanging out. So kids are being exposed to this really problematic stuff. And it's having an impact. So we did a round table and we had some Girl Guides there and we had Dr. Their eating disorder therapist there some other parents, and we did some kind of surveys and the thing that kept coming up was well if the teachers were aware of body image just as an issue and and we're aware of the impact the diet chart and bad and anti fat bias and all of these kind of issues around body image, if they were aware of of how damaging this stuff can be, then maybe they wouldn't allow the banners to go up on the school railings in the first place. So we can't get the government to do something about it right, now, we can try and affect change from the from the bottom. So me and a few other people, like other teachers got in touch with me who had an awareness about body image and other campaigners. And some of my other contacts, I can the network that I'd kind of built over the last couple of years, helped put together this workshop. And we ran it, we did a crowdfunding campaigns, we could run it for free for loads of teachers. And we actually had loads of other people sign up for it as well who worked with children. And we just saw that there was such a demand for it, you know, there's no support for adults who work with children, there's very little resources, very little support in this area that actually meets people where they're at, and actually can help take them by the hand, which is what I needed back in the day, I needed someone to say, look, this is, you know, just kind of like lift the lid on it, in a way, draw the curtain back, and then give kind of practical evidence based solutions that are often very simple, little simple tweaks, but they're just not even thought about because this way of thinking is so ingrained. And that was how body happy org developed. from reading registered, it is a proper social enterprise. And I wrote my book last year, which is obviously on this subject. And I could see that there was a demand for support. You know, that's what I'm trying to bridge that gap basically to, you know, the thing about schools is that they love to get outside speakers in to talk to their kids. And that's great, that's really positive. It's great, like, get me to come and talk to your, you know, your nines about body image great, but doesn't really mean anything. If as soon as that lessons finished, those kids are walking into a dinner Hall, and they're hearing the dinner ladies talking about their diet, and they're seeing posters on the wall, telling them that some food is good, and some food is bad. And then they're going to appeal lesson and the PE teacher is picking the fat kids last for the team, you know, or making assumptions about people's athletic ability based on their body. Like, actually, you need a whole cultural shift, it needs a whole school approach. So that's why my work is focused on the adults that are around children, rather than just speaking directly to the children.

Natasha  17:33  
And it's so important because it you know, when you talk about these things, I think about the fact when I was really little, you know, there was a lot of diet talk at home, there was a lot of weight talk at home and it started there. And I wasn't To be honest, I wasn't like a particularly big child wasn't small, but wasn't big, just regular kid had a bit of a kind of tummy always had a bit of a tummy. And which was, you know, the bane of my mother's life because my mother had a bit of a tummy as well. And she was very ashamed of hers. And she was therefore very ashamed of mine. And she said that awful thing where she's to pull my T shirt down all the time to make it cover my tummy. And she always used to put me in, we didn't have much money when we were growing up. So she didn't like to buy the next size up in clothes. My sister always got my hand me downs. But I always had like these really tight fitting clothes, because quite frankly, and I look at the pictures of me now. And I'm like I'm within six to seven plates when I was eight. That's why I looked choppy. But I also found that I was one of the bigger kids in my school and again, wasn't the biggest and wasn't particularly big but bigger, not particularly sporty, and really tried. I really did. But the teachers in my school made me very unhappy. I was the fat kid that didn't get paid. We know we had an eight and netball squad of eight. And I never once got to play a single game. There's always that person sitting on the sidelines. And there was all of this kind of, as you said, you know, good food, bad food, healthy food, non healthy food. And I grew up in a family that wasn't English, we did not eat English food, I didn't really have an understanding of what was normal within the community that I lived in. I ate my own cultural foods. So again, even that was a bit weird. I didn't I didn't eat good food because like weird food. I'm looking back now I'm like Mediterranean food. So actually, I ate really well. But that's not the point. I look at my kids as they were growing up. And I you know, I think by the time I was a parent, I was much bigger. I was really struggling with my weight had been on so many different diets by that point in time. And I know you know how the story goes just gets worse and worse and worse as you get older. My kids were super ashamed of me of their fat mom. I knew that because I was the fat mom in the playground. So I went from being the fat kid in the playground, even though it wasn't that fat to definitely be the fat mom in the playground. And that was a source of shame for my children. But then I notice and you are the one that actually helped me to see it because I noticed it beforehand. And then I started following you and listening to you and reading your stuff and thinking wow, it's way worse than I thought it was. I noticed all the little things that sheep they used to bring home you know, separate these into the good and the bad feed the healthy and they're not healthy. Those books Occasionally that you look at and you're like, Oh my gosh, that's actually really massively fat phobic. I don't understand why they've given that to read. And I remember once asking my children, what does healthy mean describe health? And they just started talking about food. Like it was the only thing they knew food and exercise. Like they didn't talk about, you know, not being sick, which is why I thought they'd say, it was all about, do you eat good food? Do you get enough exercise? Are you fat or not? The implication was mum is not healthy because she's fat. So if you've got to make the rules, and you got to legislate and choose things, how do we fix this very, very broken world that we live in? What are the what are the main ways that you can do that? No pressure?

Molly  20:43  
Well, first of all, I've put a hold on the government's massive, anti quote unquote, obesity drive, because so much of this stuff comes from these policies. It's, it's it's a war on people's bodies, and it's continuously upholding the narrative that fat is bad, thin is good. In order to be healthy, you have to look a certain way. And it's completely your health is completely your responsibility and completely within your control. So yeah, I would shut down that department. And I would, in terms of schools, and this is what we're trying to do, because schools, they have the curriculum that they have to teach. But so much of what we're seeing in schools is the teachers interpreting specific parts of the curriculum through their own lens of internalized anti fat bias. You know, I don't even like the term healthy eating because I believe in food neutrality and healthy eating immediately put some food on a pedestal, and other vilifies other food. And not only is that incredibly stigmatizing for some kids, who make them feel bad about their bodies, about their family's economic background about their culture. But also, it's from a really basic point of view, all the evidence shows, it doesn't actually promote this idea of healthy eating, it makes kids less likely to eat fruit and bench. It's not it doesn't have the impact that they that they're hoping to see, it has the opposite effect. And it seems really counterintuitive. And PSAP people people are like, Oh, we just need to give them kids more education. If they just realized that fruit and veggie was good for them, they'd eat more of it. Everyone knows that fruit and veggie is good for you. There are many reasons why people aren't eating fruit and vege. So what I would do, I would overhaul the way that we're talking about food and teaching about food in schools, one of the biggest kind of impacts on kids health, particularly like year sixes, yeah, so they learned they have like PSAT lessons, where they're learning about like eating vegetables, etc, they have sex education, I would love to see more of a focus on the impact of social media, you know, and how to navigate boundaries. And just taking a much more holistic approach to health and recognizing that actually, however we define it, health is about way more than just what you eat, and how you move your body. And actually, there's also so many things that impact our health, which are completely beyond our control, and giving kids a little bit more information about that. So really kind of taking the focus away from it just being about nutrition, just being about movement. That's not to say that you can't teach kids about nutrition and movement. But actually, these conversations don't exist in a vacuum, they don't exist in a silo, they need to be part of a bigger conversation. And reframing this idea that if you do the movement and you eat the food, you're going to look a certain way, because we know that that's not the case, actually, eating vegetables is good for everyone, regardless of the size of your body, and having a positive relationship with movement, rather than seeing it as something to kind of train your body to be a certain shape, or rather than seeing it as something that's only for people in thin bodies. You know, actually movement has loads of benefits and nothing to do with even fitness. You know, I think that with kids specifically, the way that we talk about health is the number one issue. I think at the moment. People are really quick to blame it on social media filters, and I'm sure that that is not helping. But when I talk to parents, they can be really on board with the idea that we don't want kids to just feel they have to look like supermodels, you know, they're quite on board with not having their 10 year old subjected to unrealistic beauty standards. But what some people fail to see is the way that we're talking about how the way that we're defining health is unrealistic beauty standards, the two things have become completely conflated because that's what this culture has done. That's what does culture has done is what anti fat bias has done, it has conflated looking a certain way with where your value is in the world. And at the moment, it's all about health. And in order to be a valuable, worthwhile citizen, kids are learning that they need to be healthy, that their health is totally within control. And that if they are healthy, they will look a certain way.

Natasha  25:20  
And when you have to, I mean, you know, we've both got children, we know that if you tell them not to do something, they're going to want to do it. And if you tell them to do something, they're going to want to not do it because they rebel and it's normal for children to rebel. If you say to your child, you've only got an hour on a PlayStation, they will want to spend longer than an hour on the PlayStation. If you give your child unlimited time on the PlayStation, most of the time, almost all the time, they will eventually go, I am fed up with the PlayStation and they will come off it on their own. And if you allow them to self regulate, eventually, I mean, I've certainly done that with my kids. I've seen it with PlayStation, I've seen it with snacks, I see it with all sorts of things, there is no limit, and they self regulate my kids never ever overdo it. But just they just don't. Because they don't, they don't need to because they know that they can, they can go back to it anytime there's no rules, there's no regulation. So I think the more focus, as you say, the more focus we put on certain things, the worse it gets, not the better it gets. It's not about educating children, children are highly intelligent, and they don't need us to educate them. They have social media, they can educate themselves, actually, for a lot of the time, you know, be shocked to find a child who's 10 that doesn't know that fruit and veggies are good for you. But the problem that I have, as you as you alluded to is, of course, that it's the idea that if you eat healthy food, which is great. And if you move your body, which is also great, you will look a certain way. And if you don't look a certain way you failed. And that prevailing thing is being fat is bad, you don't want to eat these kinds of foods, because you'll get fat, you do want to eat these kinds of foods, so that you don't get fat, and you are already getting fat. So you need to start eating these foods and stop eating these foods. And that's the messages we're teaching our children as young as you know, toddlers. And that's brought up two things I really want to talk to you about. The first thing is we're filming this, we're recording this just before the end of the school term. And I got a leaflets from my primary school child's office, saying this is from Hartford, your local authority, whatever, it was just one school nursing team, actually. And it was an ad for these cool free classes that you could go to throughout the summer holidays, where they weren't gonna have free food for children to enjoy. And they were going to teach them about movement. And they were going to teach them about, you know, cooking, and it all looked really good, honestly flat. But I'm not stupid. I know what these things are now, because you've opened my eyes to them amongst other people that I looked at it and wonder, yeah, he's written that. And I looked at it with a company called Bz bodies, and I looked them up. And they are what we call a weight management service. Now, this is something for those who don't know that, you know, you are seeing more and more of the majority of local authorities. The majority of GP practices, the majority of any kind of like local body have employed these private organizations to manage people's weights. And in this case, children's weights. They are for profit organizations, they make a lot of money some of them are making in the millions. They are run by people who normally have some kind of nutritional qualification. You know, they're either pts or nutritionists. They're not dietitians, they're not educators, they have no experience with children, they have nothing to do with psychology. That's they're not psychologists. And they talk about effecting behavioral changes and managing children's weight. And they use terminology that almost sounds a bit like a cult, if you were to take it out of context. What do you think about weight management services? Molly, I can see your face, you now have to somehow put you to put that into words.

Molly  28:45  
It's again, it's, it's this idea? Or where do I start? It's this idea that people's weight is something to be managed. That it's, it's, again, it's it's saying that somebody is a good bodies and somebody is a bad bodies, fat bodies are bad bodies, thin bodies are good bodies. It's all within your control, if you can just eat the right food and do the right exercise. And, you know, the reason that you're fat is because you're not doing it. Right. And it's the thing that annoys me is where's the evidence of this? This is not based on on the evidence, you know, the foresight report, it named over 100 different factors that contribute to someone's weight. And many of those factors are things that are completely out of our control. So yes, you can you can go on a diet and you might lose a bit of weight at the beginning but long term, all the evidence shows that you're going to gain the weight you're going to gain more weight. And actually that is independently bad for your health that that putting the weight on and losing the weight and putting the weight on losing the weight that weight cycling. But also, what that my main issue with this is that it just contributes to weight stigma it perpetuates anti fat bias which we also No is independently bad for health, physical and mental. And I'm not just talking about one kid calling another kid fat in the playground and hurting that kid's feelings. I'm talking about systemic oppression, I have had my own run ins with with similar services. I'll tell you about that in a minute, something that happened last year. But the thing I find really insidious is that they use the language of weight stigma, they use that kind of language to say weight stigma is really bad, you know, so what you need to do is change your kid's body. So actually, weight stigma is really bad, it's gonna really impact your kid's health. So what we need to do is change your kid's body so that they don't, you know, they don't experience weight stigma. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we need to change the culture, not the kids bodies. And if we're going to change the culture, we need to recognize that actually, even if the services are coming from a place of good intention, and people don't realize the harm, that they're effectively, you know, perpetuating, they are harmful, they are harmful. And it's not leading to positive health outcomes. If we care about health, and we care about the health of children, and we want kids to have a healthy and happy relationship with their bodies, and treat their bodies with kindness and respect, then perpetuating weight stigma is not the way to go. Because we know that that's bad for health. What are they doing? I don't, I mean, it makes me angry.

Natasha  31:31  
Yeah, we can be angry together. And of course, that brings up the other thing that of course makes you angry, I'm sure it makes me angry because the national Todd measurement program, and if you have children, or you know, in living in the UK, this is a system in which our public health department measures children when they are between five and six, and again, when they are between 10 and 11. So in year one, and in year six, but your local authority will organize it, the school nursing team will come out and organize it in your school, but it's actually all the figures are collected by Public Health England, or public health wherever you live. And it's really interesting, if you look at the rules, in my experience, the rules don't get followed, the first thing they have to do is they have to get everybody's consent, which I don't recall ever being consented. And if I was consented, and wasn't consented properly, because they didn't tell me about the dangers or the risks of weighing my children when they were six, and again, when they were 11. And if you don't tell people about the risks of doing that, then you're not consenting them properly. So that in itself is unethical. So public health, England is reaching people's basic human rights here by not making their consent forms explicit enough. These are the dangers of weighing children, here's what the evidence shows. And then, of course, you get these letters home, which are really quite hideous, which either say your child is under what is normal, but there's nothing you need to do about it, your children is within what is normal, where your children is overweight, or your child is obese. And they literally literally call you that. And you know, sometimes they're color coded. So you get like green, yellow, and red, you know, all that nonsense. And they are massively triggering for a lot of parents, because the parents know what to expect, the son just got a letter home that basically says I've weighed your child and they're obese, and join a weight management program. Here's your local free one. It's not free, it's not charity, you're paying for it with your own taxes. But that's by the by. So as far as I'm concerned, it needs to be banned. It needs to be scrapped. And that was alluded to in a report that came out back in April, that was looking at body image, which is done by the women and equalities committee, but we're not scrapping it. Instead, we're doing the opposite. And we're upping it because the government now wants to know what's happened during lockdown. Can you please explain to people why weighing children when they're young is very, very bad idea. Apart from what you've already mentioned, coming? We've alluded to it. Yeah.

Molly  33:53  
So from what I can understand, most of the time, when kids are weighed in school, they're not told their weight. So it's kind of I don't know whether their blind weight I don't think their blind weight, but they're not explicitly told their weight. The parents then get a letter to inform them, you know, what their child's weight is and where their child lies on the BMI scale. So there are many reasons that this is problematic. Lots of the time I hear from people would Why does it matter if the kids don't know what they're, you know, they're not being told. Well, why it matters is because a the whole premise of this whole scheme is based on the idea that weight is within everyone's personal control, and that is automatically bad for your health to be a high weight. It's based on the premise that BMI is a useful tool and a useful indicator of someone's individual health. Which is not true and every single health professional that I have ever spoken to recognizes the deep flaws with BMI and It seems to come down to the fact BMI is a fairly simple tool. It's an easy thing. It's cheap and easy. And it's an easy way to kind of immediately define health. So, you know, that's without even getting into the the history of BMI, which is a whole other conversation. But essentially, it's, it's deeply, deeply flawed and deeply, deeply problematic. But even even if we say, Okay, well, there's nothing wrong with BMI, BMI is fine. Let's continue to use it. Children don't find out what what they're weighed. So why does it matter? Okay, it matters because the parent then gets a letter home. And if you, if you're a parent who receives a letter, letting you know that your kid has a high BMI, what are you then going to do? You're probably likely unless you have an awareness of this whole subject, and of the huge nuances around health and it body image. And all of this, if you're probably if you're someone who's just a regular person who doesn't have a deep interest in this subject, you're probably going to panic and put your kid on a diet, or, you know, even if you're not explicitly calling it a diet, it's going to be about restricting certain foods, and probably you're going to try and increase that amount of exercise.

And you're essentially going to get them on a new quote, unquote, health regime to try and change the shape of their body because you're panicking because you want what's best for your kids health. And that's damaging, because a, we know that there's a reason why diets are not recommended for children, is dangerous. There's a reason for this. Also, we know, as we've just discussed that as soon as we're saying that some foods are good, and some foods are bad, that can actually have the opposite impact for children's relationship with food. We know that actually encouraging kids to move their body and exercise same as encouraging adults, if you're doing it for the intention of changing the shape of your body, that is not going to lead to a long term healthy, positive relationship with movement. You know, it's those external motivators, those external motivators, all the research shows is that actually, if you want to encourage and promote positive, joyful, happy relationship with exercise, using those external motivations, is is not the way to go. It has the opposite effect. So actually, there's no good that comes out of weighing in schools, the only thing that comes out of weighing in schools is that we have an idea of the population or wait. So what, actually, so what if the intention is to get kids to eat more veggies and get kids to, you know, enjoy exercise. And I'm not saying that that's what my intention is. But if that is what their intention is, there are way way better, more impactful ways of doing that than weighing kids in schools. So there's no there's no positive outcome. But there are very, very many potentially really, really harmful outcomes. And we know that the number just in the last decade, the number of pre teens diagnosed with anorexia and hospitalized has doubled just in 2020. In December, just six months ago, NHS digital data for England released stats that showed it's gone up again, by a by a fifth. You know, we know that lockdown has had a huge impact on the way that kids feel about their body. And this huge focus on all quit, we need to fix kids bodies, because they've been sitting at home, doing nothing but playing on PlayStation II and eating doughnuts is really bad for their health. You know, what about mental health, none of these, these policies and strategies and interventions are coming from an evidence based place. They're coming from a huge lens of internalized bias, that justice Humes, that people's weight is all within their control, that it's automatically bad to be fat, that you should be thin at whatever cost that we can make judgments about people based on the shape of their body, which then increases weight stigma, which is independently bad for health, it increases the number of kids who are then weight cycling, which is independently bad for their health.

Natasha  39:16  
And what's really interesting is, you know, when I was training when I was I was even when I was doing pediatrics, which was 2006 I think we had not met a children's BMI. BMI was for adults only you were not allowed to do it for children. This in of itself has become a new thing, a relatively new thing. BMI is completely unhelpful for children, because they're going through growth spurts, and they're doing strange and wonderful things as they're changing as their bodies are changing and developing. And in fact, if you think about it, there is a period of time during adolescence, when they grow massively, and they're having to literally knit bone together. Your body requires a vast quantity of energy for that. And since once upon a time, energy was scarce and we did we couldn't depend on food like we can now the body's natural in instinct is to gain fat or you know, store fat for a while, so that it's there for when you're going through that growth, in the same way that animals will store fat in the months where there's plenty of food around so that when they go through the months when there isn't any food around, they can afford to lose that way. It is natural, it is normal. And of course, if you're in year six, if you're 1011, some of you are pre pubescent, some of you are even going through puberty. So some of you will have a higher BMI, that's normal. They're not obese children. They are completely normal children that are perhaps developing at different rates, and body shame your child at that point in time, it's almost like the most crucial time in their lives is catastrophic. And even if they don't go on to develop anorexia, they almost never see as you say, will go on to develop some kind of disordered eating. And disordered eating either has the impact that has on me and my history with food, purging and bingeing. And, you know, I don't have binge eating disorder, I'm very lucky in that respect. I don't have an eating disorder. But I have very disordered eating, we all did, you did, you were starving yourself, and you're only sleeping a few hours a day. This is massively disordered, also very bad for your health. And that's the thing that we don't talk about. And BMI only gets it right one in three times. If that when you're looking at adults, you know, forget about it with children. It's not useful. It doesn't really benefit us in any way. But it can cause massively dangerous consequences. And I think the most extreme version of this is something that we talked about a few months ago, we haven't talked about for a while, but I was talking about it with my kids yesterday is the story of two young people who were in Sussex with Sussex essential services got involved from quite a young age because they were severely and you know, I am putting quotation marks around overweight, and social services got involved in their case, I'm not quite sure why because there was never any suggestion of negligence or abuse. on the part of their family, it was just weight related. for 10 years, West Sussex social services were regularly weighing regularly weight shaming and stigmatizing these children, forcing them to wear fit bits, forcing them to go to the gym, forcing them to go to Weight Watchers. The oldest was six, I believe, when it started, yeah. And was 16. When it ended, the youngest, I believe, was three at the time when they first started weighing these children. That is how much intervention social services had in their life. And then, at the beginning of the pandemic, they decided that they were going to try and remove these children from their home. And they went before a judge. And there were very few expert witnesses. In fact, there's only one expert witness who was a child psychologist, there was nobody else involved in that case, no dietician, no, no doctor, nobody with an interest in weight stigma or you know, in disordered eating, or any of those things, nobody who was supporting this family, just a couple of social workers, who basically said, because the children were given every opportunity, but failed to lose weight. As a result, we believe these children would be better off outside of their loving home. And they were removed from this family. And it's something that we got very upset about at the time, and was a very extreme version of events. But what I began to realize is that this is not an isolated case, social services. And schools can be massively interfering. Have you ever come across cases like this where, you know, people have been really judged as parents because of the size of their children? To gain fat or you know, store fat for a while, so that it's there for when you're going through that growth, in the same way that animals will store fat in the months where there's plenty of food around so that when they go through the months when there isn't any food around, they can afford to lose that way. It is natural, it is normal. And of course, if you're in year six, if you're 1011, some of you are pre pubescent, some of you are even going through puberty. So some of you will have a higher BMI, that's normal. They're not obese children, they are completely normal children that are perhaps developing at different rates, and body shame your child at that point in time, it's almost like the most crucial time in their lives is catastrophic. And even if they don't go on to develop anorexia, they almost never see as you say, will go on to develop some kind of disordered eating. And disordered eating either has the impact that has on me in my history with food, purging, and binge eating, and, you know, I don't have binge eating disorder. I'm very lucky in that respect. I don't have an eating disorder. But I have very disordered eating we all did, you did you were starving yourself, and you're only sleeping a few hours a day. This is massively disordered, and also very bad for your health. And that's the thing that we don't talk about. And BMI only gets it right one in three times. If that when you're looking at adults, you know, forget about it with children. It's not useful. It doesn't really benefit us in any way. But it can cause massively dangerous consequences. And I think the most extreme version of this is something that we talked about a few months ago we haven't talked about for a while, but I was talking about it with my kids yesterday is the story of two young people who were in Sussex with saucing social services got involved from quite a young age because they were severely and you know, I am putting quotation marks around that overweights. And social services got involved in their case, I'm not quite sure why because there was never any suggestion of negligence or abuse on the part their family, it was just weight related. for 10 years, West Sussex social services were regularly weighing regularly weight shaming and stigmatizing these children forcing them to wear fitbits, forcing them to go to the gym, forcing them to go to Weight Watchers. The oldest was six, I believe what it started Yeah. And was 16. When it ended, the youngest, I believe, was three at the time when they first started weighing these children. That is how much intervention social services had in their life. And then, at the beginning of the pandemic, they decided that they were going to try and remove these children from their home. And they went before a judge. And there were very few expert witnesses. In fact, there's only one expert witness who was a child psychologist, there was nobody else involved in that case, no dietician, no, no doctor, nobody with an interest in weight stigma or you know, in disordered eating, or any of those things, nobody who was supporting this family, just a couple of social workers, who basically said, because the children were given every opportunity, but failed to lose weight as a result, we believe these children would be better off outside of their loving home. And they were removed from this family. And it's something that we got very upset about at the time, and was a very extreme version of events. But what I began to realize is that this is not an isolated case, social services, and schools can be massively interfering. Have you ever come across cases like this where, you know, people have been really judged as parents because of the size of their children?

Molly  43:31  
I haven't come across another case like this specifically. But I have been lucky enough to run workshops for some social workers. And we've just had actually a council sign 10 of their foster carers up for one of our body happy kids workshops, which is amazing. And just like with teachers, I think the problem is, it's a complete lack of awareness and lack of support. And just this internalized bias is so ingrained, it goes so deep. That when it comes to understanding about the huge harms of negative body image and weight stigma, there's just, you know, out away from our corner of Instagram, there's a huge lack of awareness. And it's continuously perpetuated by mainstream media or government policy. And it's deeply, deeply upsetting because it just, it's so unnecessary. It doesn't need to be this way. And that's the thing that's upsetting is that anyone who works in this area in this field, whatever their specific area of expertise, if they were just consulted in cases like this, if they just as you said, brought in a couple of different expert witnesses, or if the social care team had just had a little bit more CBD training in this area, then maybe Maybe it would never have got to this point. And that's why it's so upsetting because there is a fix for this stuff. And it doesn't it's not a complicated fix, it doesn't have to be such a difficult thing. It's conversations, essentially, and listening and drawing evidence from more than just one field. I don't believe that anyone who goes into being a social worker, or a teacher, or a doctor, or any of these caring professions, I don't believe anyone goes into these professions wanting to do harm. Maybe I'm naive. I mean, I'm married to a teacher, and I'm the daughter of teachers. So I obviously, you know, like I'm on their side. And with social workers, like my best friend was a social worker for a number of years, I believe that these people go into these professions because they want to do good, they want to help.

And it's really, really upsetting when you hear about these terrible cases where they've just got it. So so wrong. I did hear about something last year, which was, I alluded to it before, when you're talking about this weight management company. And there was a similar, I can't remember where they were based, I think it was like the East East England somewhere. Someone got in touch with me, anonymously, or Well, she wasn't anonymous, but she wanted to remain anonymous, she worked in a school she'd received a email from this local company who were affiliated with the local educational authority. And they had sent out this PowerPoint series of slides all about the dangers of childhood obesity, quote, unquote, and how the schools had a moral and professional obligation to ensure that all of that it was during lockdown. So they wanted them to send out these slides to all of their home learners. So the parents to support the parents were teaching a lesson about healthy eating and exercise and the dangers of fatness. And on this slide, I mean, that's problematic for so many reasons. Anyway, as you know, if people have listened this file, they will understand why, but also, they have this slide that said, children who are high away are less likely to get married, less likely to get a good job, less likely to do well at school. And it was this assumption, which is exactly the same as the way that the Public Health England document about promoting the national weight measurement program is worded is this assumption, that the reason that this is happening, the reason that children might, you know, not do so well at school, or you know, might not get, you know, a high as higher paid job. The reason is because of the fatness, you know, it's there, they're somehow there, that body is preventing them from getting an A in science, you know, actually, it's the weight stigma. You know, we know that it's the weight stigma, it's again, but it's exactly the same way as what we think we do with with with weight and health, when we conflate and we say, being fat is the cause of of diabetes, you know, we're the third triangulating factor, which is completely missing, missing out. And, and that's what this company were doing. And I and I took them to task on it. And and they removed the, the, you know, they withdrew it. They they pulled it all back, they sent a letter out to all the schools, so please don't use these resources. They never actually apologize publicly because they didn't want to hold their hands up and say, yeah, it was us, we made a mistake. They were like we're investigating, we're investigating. But this is what we're seeing. And this is the same as like with with that case, that you know, that case in West Sussex, it's this immediate conflation, that one plus one equals five. And it's happening all the time. And again, it's happening due to a lack of education or lack of training, a lack of resources, or lack of support, and a lack of awareness.

Natasha  49:00  
I could talk to you all day, I can't believe we've been talking this long. This is what happens with us. We'll have to do it again. It's all I can say we'll have to do it again. But just briefly, because you have done so much research your book and you talk to such amazing people and your book is so fantastic. Just in a few minutes. Tell us about your book and what to expect and why we should buy it because you should definitely buy it people are like raving about it. Like literally so many people have been like how do you read this book? I'm like, I know.

Molly  49:28  
Oh, thank you that that's that's really amazing to hear. And it's called body happy kids how to help children and teens love the skin they're in. If you're interested in helping your kids have a healthy and happy relationship with their bodies with food with movement. You know you're interested with helping them navigate things like social media toys, what they see on TV, and you want practical evidence based kind of actual tools that you can take away from this as well as learning. You know where some of The problems may lie, you know, it's not just kind of lifting the lid on of a Pandora's box on things and leaving you with with no way to resolve this stuff I wanted to give people like a feeling of Hope is an overused word empower, but I can't think of another word to supplement it, but basically give people some kind of tools that they can actually practically use in their day to day lives. I am not a doctor, I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not a body image researcher. But I am a journalist. And one thing I'm good at doing is interviewing lots of different people and drawing together lots of different arguments. And the difference with this book, and another book is that it's a real multidisciplinary book, it draws together a real kind of overview, and hopefully, unpack some of the nuances around this subject. I wish that I'd known you when I was writing the book, because I could have interviewed you for it. But yeah, I interviewed lots of different people for it from all over the world from lots of different areas of you know, discipline, whether it's doctors, but also academics and campaigners, and activists and educators, lots of different types of people. And it's not just talking about weight stigma and anti fat bias, it's also talking about big things like you know, gender stereotypes, clothes, media literacy, the socio economic conversation, as well, the social determinants of health, all of this stuff. And hopefully, I've done it in an accessible, relatable way. So that if you are knackered parent, and you don't have much brain space, at the end of a long day with the kids, it's still readable, you know, and entertaining. Hopefully,

Natasha  51:37  
it is it is everyone says it. So it definitely is, if you're going to have a child, you should read this not just What to Expect When You're Expecting but also read this book, because actually, if you do think that a lot of the issues that we've been facing for the last 4050 years, we'll improve massively. If we get it right with our kids, there's no point talking to our children about body image when they're 12. It's too late, you need to talk about body image when they're three, from the beginning from when they're babies. Now we let babies eat whenever they want, and then we stop schooling them from such a young age. If we can just stop right there in that moment, and get it right, I think we can make a huge difference. What's really exciting is seeing people like yourself, doing this stuff, right at the very sort of like at the very beginning, educating the teachers that are going to go on to teach all of these children like if you can catch those people, you can touch the parents at the right stage, you are going to make a huge difference in the long term. If people don't know you don't know why they don't know even if they don't know you, where can they find you.

Molly  52:36  
Probably Instagram is a good place to be. And sometimes they're an app, Molly J. Forbes on Instagram, Molly with a y, j, Forbes fo RB F. But I would really encourage everyone to go to Adi hoppy org.com because there are loads of resources there. Lots of free stuff, lots of information, as well as books and things that you can that can help you with starting to unpack some of this stuff. So yeah, hopefully that will be useful and helpful for people.

Natasha  53:07  
It really is amazing. I use the website all the time. This is one of my reference points. And thank you so much for coming on and doing this podcast with me. I will of course Talk to you again soon. And I know that people will have enjoyed this I will link all of the different ways to access your web. It's body Happy org.com By the way, cuz I used to Google body happy.org. And that doesn't work is Thank you very much, and we'll catch you soon. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening and I hope you've enjoyed yourself today. If you want to get more involved with the Fat Doctor podcast, then why not check out my Patreon I am at the Fat Doctor. And on there, I offer a variety of different tiers. Depending on how much you can afford each month you get this same access no matter which tier you subscribe to. And one of the many benefits of joining my Patreon is you get a chance to listen to some extended podcast episodes. I've also got a Facebook group friends of Fat Doctor, and there's my website www dot Fat doctor.com. For those of you who follow me on social media, on Instagram, on Twitter, and even on tik tok, can you believe it? Join me next time for another episode tackling a weight stigma and fat oppression